The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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June 28, 2013

The French don’t have an aristocracy, right? It was bloodily consigned
to history, along with the French monarchy, during the Revolution, wasn’t it?
Well, not quite. Leaving aside the fact that Napoleon declared himself Emperor
in 1804 – was the Revolution really intended to lead to that? – the Restoration
of the Bourbons and the Bourbon-Orleans monarchy in 1814 took things up to 1848
and as if that wasn’t enough Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire lasted from 1852 to
1870. Only in that year did France embark on its succession of Republics,
interrupted by the Second World War, Marshal Pétain and Vichy.

There certainly was a cull of the nobility, and those who survived lost
certain rights and privileges; some went abroad, leaving their estates in capable
hands, and returned when conditions were more propitious. Others adapted to the
changed circumstances. Think of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who
served under the ancien régime, was President of the National Assembly during
the Revolution and held various senior diplomatic posts under the Directoire,
the Empire, Restoration, July Monarchy. Others still retreated to their
chateaux and kept their heads down.

To take one prominent public figure today, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,
centre-right President of France from 1974 to 1981, and now one of the forty
“Immortals” in the Académie française, comes from minor nobility – the “d’” in his name was clearly no hindrance to his getting elected.

Valentine de Ganay doesn’t go into details of her family’s history in her entertaining book Aristo?,
which her publishers JC Lattès characterize as “un essai de sociologie
subjective”, but it appears to originate from Burgundy in the 14th
century. Ganay claims that the aristocracy in France is “no longer a social
class”. She’s certainly irreverent about those with social pretensions today,
referring to people as Machin de Machin (Thingummy of Thingummy). It’s not her
fault that her mother’s full name is Philippine de Noailles de Mouchy de Poix
de Ganay – a name she has been known to use, such as when she broke down on the
autoroute and gave her name to the breakdown man: “C’est français, ça?!” was
his reply.

Philippine would have liked to spend time on yachts or in Venice,
but she married a gentleman farmer who preferred to spend the second half of
August in Scotland shooting grouse (and who once took Valentine to Patagonia to
try to teach her to shoot deer). They have a chateau, Courances, 70 km south of
Paris near Fontainebleau, where Valentine stages events and whose grounds are
open to the public.

Valentine, much the youngest of four sisters, came as a disappointment
to her father, who was hoping for an heir. But Valentine, as well as being a
trapeze artist, horticulturalist and mother, is clearly the most
independent-minded of the four: when, in answer to a question from her father, she
reveals that she voted for Giscard’s successor François Mitterrand in 1981 (her
first opportunity to exercise her democratic right), he is physically sick, and
dismisses her from his presence. Later Mitterrand requests an invitation to
Courances, where Valentine’s father greets him in a strictly official capacity
(in his role as mayor): “Mitterrand and he will never be pals”. She lets slip
that they never received a thank-you letter from the Elysée Palace.

Another public figure who dropped in was Prince Charles - “’Guess who’s
invited himself to stay?’ our mother asks us.” Ganay reveals that he asked for
his breakfast to be brought up to his room.

When Valentine breaks the news to her parents of her engagement she
receives the following reaction (from her mother): “Je vous avouerais que je
m’attendais à un comportement moins conventionnel de votre part” (I have to admit that I was expecting less conventional behaviour from you) – notice the
formal vouvoiement from mother to
daughter – at what point in their relationship, one wonders, did the mother
switch from “tu” to “vous”.

Her father has an office that overlooks the National Assembly and the
Place de la Concorde, in a building that once housed “the prestigious Club de
la Pomme de Terre”. Ganay tells us that a painting that represents several
members of that club has recently been acquired by the Musée d’Orsay; it
includes two members of the Ganay family as well as Charles Haas, one of the
models for Proust’s Charles Swann.

Proust’s novel is of course awash with aristocrats: Mme de Villeparisis,
M. and Mme de Guermantes (duke and duchess) and M. de Charlus (baron) among many others; the
narrator Marcel is at the same time fascinated by a cast to which he will never
belong, its rituals, traditions and eccentricities, and contemptuous
of its philistinism and its unthinking callousness to outsiders. And they
provide rich material for comedy, as in the scene in Du côté de chez Swann at a musical soirée at the marquise (mais bien sûr) de Saint-Euverte, where
Marcel compares the style of monocle worn by the various aristos, all doubtless
members of the Jockey Club – “le Jockey”.

I find the little snippets Ganay dispenses fascinating: when her sister
organizes weekend parties at her chateau in the Vendée, she insists on the
announcement “La comtesse est servie” whereas her mother prefers “Le déjeuner
est servi”. She points out that her mother doesn’t particularly want to be laid
out on a silver salver with parsley sticking out of her ears.

And when Valentine confesses to her parents that she has had an
affair with “L’Autre” shortly before the day of her wedding, which is to be
lavishly celebrated at Courances, her father tells her that she has “les moeurs
d’une femme de chambre” (as it happens, Le
journal d’une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau is one of her favourite
novels). The wedding to German artist Franck goes ahead, and the
union appears to have endured.

Ganay concludes by saying that “some aristos will reproach me with
having overdone it . . .”, but the rest of us should be thankful to her for so
revealingly, and stylishly, opening a window onto her world.

June 26, 2013

Bad English kings were rich, the good ones poor. Such a conclusion, familiar
and almost comforting to those anxious about our modern world, seems still
somewhat unexpected for the Middle Ages. This week Chris Given-Wilson
reviews the first edited and published account of “bad king” Richard II’s
treasure, an inventory on a 28-metre parchment roll in the National
Archives. Visitors to the Tower of London can be forgiven for forming the
impression that our royal collection of crowns and orbs dates back to the
misty origins of England. Of the 2,300 items listed in 1399, only one
survives, a handsome crown that is on display in Munich, a piece valued at a
mere £246 at the time when Richard’s “great crown” was worth £33,584.
Richard II was a greedy hoarder of wealth until he was murdered by an heir
whom he had dispossessed. So was Edward II, another little-lamented monarch
whose death by red-hot poker was discussed in a recent issue of the TLS.
Those “good kings”, Edward I, Edward III and Henry V, died deeply in debt.

That cheap surviving £246 crown was quite good enough for queens, a
gender-based distinction in wealth that has taken many centuries to lessen
in any serious way. Paul Seabright reviews two new books about women and
power in the modern workplace, covering education, ambition, the conditions
for dispensing with feminism and the relationship (inverse, it seems)
between early sex and career success. One of them, by the Facebook Chief
Executive Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has attracted much more attention than
the other, by Alison Wolf. Seabright believes that readers in years to come
may give them the opposite priority. Sandberg’s advice is peculiarly weak on
irony and seems directed only at women who want to be like her, or to have
children like her, ideally both.

Frances Wilson, reviewing Judith Mackrell’s “sober and sure-footed” Flappers,
notes the similar female predicaments of Zelda Fitzgerald and Dorothy
Wordsworth. “Each had her sensibility plundered to enrich the writing of the
man she loved.”

My younger daughter has just had her biometric passport, or e-passport, renewed, complete with electronic chip. “It meets standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.” The personal details and photograph now appear at the front rather than back. On the inside leaf, below the royal coat of arms and injunction – “Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary” – is an image of a picturesque terrace of houses, maybe in the Slaughters in the Cotswolds.

On the following 31 pages are “intricate designs and complex watermarks”, ready to be besmirched by visa stamps . They are adorned with traditional images of natural phenomena - “Reedbed” (see below), “Geological Formation”, “Shingle”, “Beach”, “Woodland”, “Moorland” -

and man-made ones: “Village Green” (below), “Canal”, “Fishing Village”. There are also “Mountain” and “Lake”, not features these islands are over-endowed with. In the top corner appears a cloud or sun of the kind we see on weather charts; realistically, unbroken sunshine is absent. But also absent are any representations of towns and cities, as are roads, motorways, ports, shopping centres, commercial parks, sporting arenas, etc.

This is a National Trust version of the nation that is being peddled. Far from unpleasant of course, but whom is it aimed at? Not the passport holders themselves presumably. Maybe the immigration officials who will be stamping those visas into the passport.

June 24, 2013

Half-way
through Friday evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, Patti Smith
interrupted her flow of song, memoir extract, song, poem, song, with: “Any
questions?” The audience didn’t respond. Patti Smith commented that when it was
silent after she asked the same question at an Italian press conference a few
years ago – possibly also because her vocabulary was limited to “ciao” and “super
marcato” – she walked out.

Someone
suddenly shouted, “Is there anything in your life that you still want to do?” “No,
I’m done”, she replied, with deadpan humour. And then continued, “Come on, have
you been to a library? Look how many books there are you or I haven’t read.
There are a million things I want to do. I love being alive. The thing I most
dread is being run over by a Volkswagen before I’ve done my masterpiece. So I just
avoid Volkswagens.”

For
Patti Smith to suggest she has not yet made her masterpiece is humble – the
show, which was part of the Southbank’s annual Meltdown Festival (guest curated
by Yoko Ono this year), sold out immediately. Like me, the rest of Friday’s audience
was not prepared for a genuine dialogue with the punk musician and writer
(her memoir, Just Kids, about her
relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award
for nonfiction in 2010). But then this was no usual gig. The Purcell Room, modest and comfortable, complemented the mixture of reading and singing with her
acoustic band, which consisted of her son, Jackson Smith, on guitar, and her
daughter, Jesse Paris, on keys (both played well). “Don’t try to show me up”,
Patti Smith joked to them at the beginning, “remember, I’ve got the upper hand,
I changed both their diapers.” Affectionate exchanges like this happened on
stage throughout the night.

Her
first few songs were mellow with a blues feel, and chosen from later albums
such as Gone Again (1996), Gung Ho (2000) and Trampin’ (2004). In “My Blakean Year”, Smith’s crescendo
foot-tapping revelled in the song’s incantatory reference to William Blake’s poem “The
Divine Image”. Her infectious energy moved the song from melodious ballad to
characteristic grittiness; and from then on, she chose songs with bite. Defiant
fists punching the air, she sang the refrain from “Ghost Dance” (1978): “we
shall live again / we shall live again / shake out the ghost dance”.

We heard
a selection of poems, mostly taken from Smith’s poetic memoir Woolgathering (1992), with the same punctuated
rhythm and intonation as her songs (and, often, her speech) – this
cross-over meant Smith’s formal reading neatly drifted into ad lib “little
memories” and additions. The poem “Art in Heaven” included lyrical refrains,
“all you need is a helping hand to be lifted, lifted” and “I dreamed of being a
missionary / I dreamed of being a mercenary”. “Cowboy Truth”, dedicated to her long-standing friend and former lover Sam Shepard, ends with enigmatic, spiritual
imagery blended with a song-writer’s ear: “You are not forgotten, that is his
word, / his one great truth as he re-enacts the rituals of youth. / Putting
things right, just a dusty piece of humanity, / heaven’s hired hand.” Smith
introduced this with an anecdote about her second encounter with Shepard
in 1970, which cemented their friendship. She had stolen two beef steaks from a
New York shop (she was suffering from anaemia at the time but couldn’t afford
to buy red meat) and bumped into Shepard on her way home. After some time
talking, Smith told him she had to leave because she had two steaks in her
pocket that were melting. He didn’t believe her, stuck his hands into her
pockets and encountered the thawing meat. “For the next three months, he bought
me a steak each day.”

When it
came to “Because the Night” (co-written with Bruce Springsteen), Smith mucked
up her first verse entry with a burst of laughter. “Well it’s my only hit song
so I’ve got to draw it out.” Beginning again, she delivered her second attempt magnificently.

The
encore included a reworked version of “Banga”, the title track from her most
recent album, named after the dog in The Master and Margarita.
We were encouraged to join in with our own howls and barks, and Smith inserted new
spoken material between the verses, “this talking cat caused a riot, a
sweet riot . . . ” – a show of support, continuing her notorious political activism, for the Russian group Pussy Riot, following their "Punk Prayer" protest against Putin in February last year.

Because
Smith (and her family) created a unique atmosphere, it felt like the night did
belong to us.

June 20, 2013

Is it all over for Cork Street? Back in the day, the annual summer party was something of a crush. The galleries opened their doors and the street was closed off at either end. Security guards patrolled to keep out the gatecrashers who would look down at the glittering scene and wanted to be where it was happening.

But there were no barriers or guards last night, let alone any gatecrashers. Anyone could walk by. I thought for a moment I must have the wrong date as I stepped out of Burlington Arcade and looked across the way to Cork Street, down which shiny cars were moving slowly but where I could see no crowd – or not much of one. A few people had gathered outside the beaux arts gallery, but then, the beaux arts gallery was serving wine, and last night was 28 degrees in central London, the warmest night in nine months, I heard when I got home.

I saw wine at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, but only a couple of glasses behind the desk, and the smiling assistant told me that it was just for the staff – to keep them going, he said, as though the evening were something of an ordeal – in spite of the gallery being virtually empty, and that in spite of the fact that it had the most beautiful exhibition in the street, of Robert Motherwell collages.

There were also some exceptionally beautiful pictures by Agnes Martin across the road, in the Mayor Gallery at 22a – in a show together with five other women artists called "The Nature of Women" – but it wasn’t as though I had to compete with any other viewers. I had those small perfect works almost to myself and could have stood as long as I liked in front of them – or would have done, except that they turned off the lights.

Waddington, across the road at number 11, was closed altogether. I could only look at the Patrick Caulfields through the window, and was distracted in any case by the cleaner who sombrely pushed a vacuum across the wide open empty space.

Perhaps everybody was round the corner at Sotheby’s, which last night had a large ticketed sale of Impressionist and modern art. Or they were too exhausted after the Basle-Venice roadshow. Or they were saving themselves for Vyner Street Thursday, when the dozens of galleries in the cobbled backstreet by Regent’s canal, at the end of Broadway Market in East London, open on the first Thursday of every month. Or they were thinking of visiting Gagosian in King’s Cross, or White Cube in Bermondsey, or Saatchi’s in Chelsea, or any one of the thirty-odd galleries that have opened up in Fitzrovia, which, like Vyner Street, might now be said to be one of the new centres of commercial art in London.

But wherever it is, it’s not Cork Street. Westminster Council has plans to develop the street, and as I stood there fanning myself in the sultry heat with a piece of card advertising Bernard Cohen’s exciting exhibition at Flowers, it was pointed out to me that five galleries north of that show will be demolished in the autumn. Another large chunk of buildings on the other side will be demolished next year. Nor does it seem there was much protest against the development. Few, I was told, turned up at the party organized to register unhappiness about the council’s plans, and the gallerist I spoke to was sanguine about having to move. He’d get a bigger space, he thought. He doesn't want to hang around where nobody else wants to be any more.

This year will also be the last Cork Street Open – an exhibition which has run for the past five years, providing an opportunity for new and established artists to complete to show their work, a kind of Cork Street version of the RA summer show. “Due to other business commitments and changes with the premises a decision has been taken to make this summer show the last”. The final exhibition will run from August 9 to 16. Catch it while you can.

June 19, 2013

The philosopher Anthony Kenny, one of the clearest modern writers to wrestle
with the difficulties of Christian belief, this week considers the religious
warfare within the work of C. S. Lewis. Reviewing a new biography of the
author of the Narnia stories, he praises its careful correction of many
previous accounts, that by Lewis himself being the one “most in need of
emendation”. He notes the argument over whether Elizabeth Anscombe, a more
formidable Christian philosopher than Lewis by far, was rewarded for her
ferocity by a characterization as the White Witch. Nowadays, Lewis’s
theological works “preach mainly to the converted”.

Battles between Christian and pagan were no less fiercely fought among the
ancient commentators on Aristotle. David Sedley praises the ninety-ninth
volume of a massive project of the past twenty-five years to translate into
English all the scholarship of such men as Simplicius and John Philoponus,
great scholars with an immense armoury of scorn and “derogatory epithets”.
Volume Ninety-nine concerns the offence to Christian doctrine caused by
eighteen different fifth-century arguments for the world’s having no
beginning and no end.

Oscar Wilde’s interest in ancient philosophy is familiarly described in terms of
“Plato and sexual intimacy between men”, writes Joseph Bristow, reviewing a
new study by Iain Ross. The influence of Wilde’s archaeologist father is
often neglected. The playwright had a very “advanced classical education”,
and was deeply imbued with the conflict between the new archaeology and more
traditional textual criticism. In extending the feuds of scholars into The
Picture of Dorian Gray the author, however, goes a little too far.

There has been no more potent explosion of Christianity and paganism in the
modern age than Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, described by
the composer’s friend Robert Craft in a centenary appreciation as “the image
of God as expressed in the primitivism of pagan Russia”. Craft interprets
Stravinsky’s own faint pencilled instructions on how the work should be
danced.

Peter Stothard

NB Take part in the TLS Reader Survey and win £50 in Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificates (UK & ROI only).

June 18, 2013

Maurice Nadeau, who has died at the tender age of
102, was, according to John Calder, writing in the TLS, “the most versatile
and many-faceted figure in post-war literary Paris”. Nadeau cut his teeth on the books pages of Combat,
before becoming its director. Albert
Camus was an early editor. He wrote a history of Surrealism (1945), but later fell out with the high priest of that movement André Breton. There were also books on Sade
and Flaubert. Nadeau had a lifelong commitment to the Left and was involved in anti-Algerian war demonstrations.

In 1966 Nadeau set up the Quinzaine littéraire, taking the
recently founded New York Review of Books
as a model (although, unlike its precursor, it generally eschewed polemics). His assistant on the journal
was Anne Sarraute, daughter of the novelist Nathalie (who herself died at the
age of ninety-nine). According to Marion Van Renterghem, writing in Le Monde (June 18), when Anne Sarraute
died in 2008, Nadeau exclaimed “Subir ça à 97 ans, mince! J’en ai pris un vieux
coup” (a real blow). The Quinzaine,
which has always given generous coverage to foreign literature, preserves an
old-fashioned appearance and doesn’t pay its contributors; it has struggled in
recent years against a falling circulation, but Nadeau was determined to keep
the show on the road. It limps on to this day, and was recently bailed out by the luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.

The biographer and critic Pierre Assouline, writing
on his blog La République des
livres, listed well over a hundred authors French readers can thank Nadeau
for having discovered in his role of publisher. They include Georges Perec (Les Choses), Roland Barthes, Michel Leiris, Tahar Ben Jelloun,
Jean-Marie Le Clézio and, among foreign writers, Lawrence Durrell, Malcolm
Lowry, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wright, J. M. Coetzee, Thomas Bernhard and
Leonardo Sciascia. He hailed Claude Simon when his first novel was published,
defended Henry Miller against the censors and just missed out on publishing Samuel
Beckett. He had no proprietorial feelings towards writers and was happy to let
them move on to bigger publishers - Nadeau claims never to have made any money
for the various publishers he worked for: “just ask them!”

More recently Nadeau published Michel Houellebecq’s
first novel Extension du domaine de la
lutte (1994). Houellebecq went to the giants Flammarion for his second and
subsequent novels. Nadeau, meanwhile, turned down Houellebecq’s poetry, explaining that
“Houellebecq has published a poem called '[Jacques] Prévert est un con’ and as this ‘con’
is my friend . . .”.

June 14, 2013

Apparently it's still just about possible – today at least – to book for the A. N. L. Munby conference at the end of this month that I mentioned previously on this blog. I mention it again not only in a spirit of rampant self-promotion (I'm giving a paper on Munby and the TLS – of all the unexpected things) but also to note something I only mentioned in passing last time round: that Munby the bookman was also Munby the writer of ghost stories.

The Sundial Press, more familiar to me as the small press that has reissued some works of the Powys brothers and their circle, are reissuing a collection of these stories, The Alabaster Hand. The claim, drawn from the Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, is that Munby is the writer "who comes closest to inheriting the mantle of M. R. James".

That's quite a claim, isn't it? Other readers must have their own candidates to inherit the mantle of the master, but here at least are a few votes in Munby's favour. It's also a bold statement given how difficult it is, apparently, to write a ghost story that can actually scare its readers. And it might involve avoiding Jamesian trappings as much as paying homage to his techniques.

To take a personal favourite as an example: there's a purportedly real-life incident buried in Twenty-Five, an early exercise in autobiography by Beverley Nichols, and it's all the better for being surrounded by Nichols's otherwise unflappable reminiscences about mixing with politicians, writers, etc. It is the last place you'd look for a ghost story.

In any case, I'm sure Munby, as a book collector, would have been amused, if not proud, to see "near fine" copies of the first edition of his collection going for somewhat more than a song.

A short TLS review of the reissue will follow in due course, I hope. For the time being I'm looking forward to the postprandial entertainment for delegates on the first night of the Cambridge conference: a reading from one of those stories with an appopriately bookish inflection, "The Tregannet Book of Hours", by the actor Richard Heffer.

June 13, 2013

Not all authors have nous – meaning practical intelligence, to extend one OED definition of the word – when it comes to the business of selling books. But see above for a heartening example of George Eliot’s mind at work on this noble subject. Here, on May 2, 1873, “M. E. Evans" announces herself to be “nothing but content” with her publisher's proposal to reduce the price of her books from 3/6 to 2/6, and ditch some of the embellishments:

“To my taste the volumes will be better for being freed from the illustrations – save & except the pretty vignettes. . . . The appearance of the 3/6 volumes is so handsome that they may part with some of their costliness & yet be respectable.”

Eliot saw how such a simple expedient could benefit both parties:

“As to the effect on future sales I imagine that the wide distribution of Miss Austen’s books in the shilling copies greatly increased the sale of the Bentley’s Library Edition. The Parlour Library made her name. . . . Let us hope that the 2/6 edition of the five books would cause all the better sale for a future revised series including all my works – prose and verse.”

And so nous based on precedent (“the wide distribution of Miss Austen’s books”) joins hands with authorial tenderness for her own creations (“a future revised series” that tenderness eventually produced, a few years later, was the grand Cabinet Edition of Eliot’s works – twenty beautiful volumes – not exactly bestsellers, though. The cut-price Eliot, by contrast, points the way to the mass paperback schemes of the twentieth century.

The letter isn't in the standard edition of Eliot’s letters, and is currently itself on sale, for £3,000, courtesy of the nineteenth-century specialists Jarndyce, alongside other wonders I hope to gawp at during the London International Antiquarian Book Fair, which opens today. Jarndyce also have, for example, various Dickens ALSs, exhibiting nous, or at least an informed cynicism, as he seeks to prevent the unauthorized performance of a play by him and Wilkie Collins: “I privately doubt the strength of our position in the Court of Chancery, if we try it; but it is worth trying”.

Compare these wise authors of the nineteenth century with a recently discovered oddity concerning one of the greats of a hundred years earlier, Laurence Sterne.

The first volumes of Sterne’s ab ovo masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, appeared in 1759. When exactly it was published that year has remained something of a mystery.

This much has been known for a while, courtesy of an advertisement spotted in the London Chronicle on December 20:

Which sent the investigators looking for a publication date around Christmas. Alas, that was the wrong way; and Elinor Camille-Wood and Patrick Wildgust have earned the admiration and gratitude of biographers, literary historians, pedants and obsessives the world over for turning in the other direction, and finding this ad buried in the York Courant for December 18:

This is good timing, as the tercenternary of Sterne’s birth falls this year. Does it have anything to do with authors’ nous? Well, maybe. Note that devilish Greek couplet in the middle of the York ad – it’s taken from Sterne’s title page:

You might wonder who thought it was a good idea to reproduce a motto from Epictetus (“Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men”), given that, as W. G. Day notes, “It is most unusual for Greek type to be used in an advertisement for a work of fiction in this way”. Was this Sterne himself “aiming his work at an audience of higher than average intelligence and linguistic competence”? And, showing another kind of nous, was it wiser of the London booksellers to take a more “pragmatic view of the market” and omit “what might have been seen as off-putting to many possible readers”?

“The Book will sell”, Sterne had assured them, earlier that year. A common conviction among his sort . . . .